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Saturday, May 23, 2015

Last Tuesday, "Uncle Bob" Martin spoke live at Ticketmaster. [Thanks, again, to Jody Mulkey for organizing an excellent event!]

He spoke, unsurprisingly, on Test Driven Development (TDD).

TheHackerCIO loved the hat he wore! Someone brought it -- a professor from Loyola, I believe. It was a stitched together amalgamation of three baseball caps, so that one faced forward and two others flapped off on either side of the ears. The three caps were each Red, Green, and Blue -- the TDD colors! So, as Uncle Bob demonstrated TDD on-screen, and wrote his first failing test, and his IDE switched colors from JUnit to Red, he placed the Red cap forward. Then he cycled through fixing the code, and when he got to green, the Green Cap went forward. As he refactored, he then physically went blue. It was pretty cool. I snapped a shot, but he was pretty far away.

One of the more interesting points he made was an analogy with the accounting profession. He posed the question to the audience ... "What other group of people manipulate a set of symbols with such a level of precision that every tiny error must absolutely be corrected. [TheHackerCIO: my words, his idea]" And the audience came up with "accounting." Uncle Bob's take is that double-entry bookkeeping is the technology invented to deal with this condition. Invented in the Renaissance, double-entry bookkeeping only achieved universal acceptance in every country in something like 1945.

According to Uncle Bob, TDD is double-entry bookkeeping applied to code.

And he predicts that it will eventually sweep the world.

Watch the video of the event here:

If you like what you saw with Uncle Bob, DevTalkLA, a Westside Meetup will begin working through his book Clean Code (pictured above), starting this coming Tuesday. You can find out more, and even attend -- we love guests -- by clicking here.